At some news organisations new products and technologies develop from the top down. The boss decides something needs to be done and a team is deputed to put that into action. The Guardian, however, tends to operate on a much more organic model; an idea is hatched, and then it grows and multiplies with minimal intervention. So it has been with the new Guardian Weekly podcast.

The Guardian Weekly for the best part of a century has been offering an international audience a selection of the best of the Guardian that is likely to be of interest to them, with a leavening now of material from the Observer, Le Monde and the Washington Post, and an additional spice of material all of its own. So it seemed entirely logical that with the Guardian audio output growing fast, the same model could be applied to a podcast.

And at the Guardian Weekly we had the germ of a team to put that into action. For the presenter: Mark King, who is just joining us from Money Observer, where as deputy editor he's been representing the magazine on a regular consumer slot at a range of BBC radio stations, from Coventry to Northampton to Scotland.

For the producer there was me: deputy editor and long-time print journalist, but with a background in Australian radio back in the days when you used to edit the reel-to-reel tape with a razor blade, and an enthusiasm for new technology.

Editorial assistant Harriet Horobin-Worley, age 18, came on board as expert guide to iTunes, which we use to mix the show. (The "small child programming the video-recorder for their parents" role, you might call it.)

The Guardian's podcast guru Tim Maby kindly came to the party in the midst of many demands on his time. He offered us the quick introduction to Audacity -- the editing programme that he assures us is best, on Macs at least, with the added virtue of being free, open source software. And we had a quick session on how to use the Guardian's podcast studio -- crammed into a corner of the fifth floor, where the web people hang out beneath screens that flash a bewildering array of data about how the Guardian's servers are doing.

The advertising team brought Abbey International on board as sponsors, Cathy Shostak composed some music just for the show, capturing, we hoped, the mood. And then suddenly, there we were, ready to launch into our first programme. (After a small glitch with a hard drive that lost a whole slug of material.)

Editor Patrick Ensor came into the studio to offer a broad perspective on the new venture, to talk about how the paper has developed since he took the chair in 1993, when the Weekly's most famous reader, Nelson Mandela, was just starting to develop the new post-apartheid South Africa.

So now we're going to find out an answer to the question posed by Elisabeth Ribbans on these pages earlier this week: is anyone listening to podcasts?